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WELCOME FROM THE DIRECTOR

Dear Friends of STS, Once again it is time to update you on developments in the STS Program at Harvard. In the past year we have built new connections and nurtured longstanding collaborations that have markedly increased the visibility and reach of our research, teaching, and events. Our connections to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have proved especially fruitful. We are currently seeking a postdoctoral fellow, jointly supported by SEAS and the STS Program, to help teach courses and conduct research. SEAS is also a cosponsor and host of the STS Circle, our weekly seminar series. The Harvard University Center for the Environment and the Graduate School of Design continue to support the hugely successful events in our Science and Democracy lecture series, most recently featuring Errol Morris, the renowned film director, and Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of the consumer genetics company 23andMe. We have developed new connections to Harvard Law School through the Institute for Global Law and Policy directed by Professor David Kennedy. Joint programming sponsored by STS and IGLP includes invited speakers, a faculty and student discussion group on expertise, a co-taught course, and workshops furthering research at the intersection of law and STS.   Internationally, our connections with colleagues in Europe continue to thrive. Last summer’s annual meeting of the Science and Democracy Network was held in Paris, testifying to growing ties between the Harvard STS Program and the center for excellence in innovation studies in Paris. This marked the beginning of what we hope will be a pattern of SDN meetings alternately hosted by partner institutions in the United States and Europe. The Program also developed a new web-based portal, http://stsnext20.org/, to encourage discussion of matters relating to STS. Most importantly, our research and training endeavors have continued to expand and grow, with increasing participation and interest in the Graduate Secondary Field in STS from across the university. In addition, I am pleased to report on new research grants, new publications, and exciting new career milestones for former STS fellows. Please read more about all of these developments below. With best wishes for the new year and thanks for your continued interest and support,

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FALL 2012

UPCOMING EVENTS

December 11, 2012:  Science & Democracy Lecture by Phillip Sharp, MIT, on “New Biology and Society”

February 6, 2013:  Science & Democracy Lecture by Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society

June 30-July 2, 2013: 12th Annual Science and Democracy Network Meeting, Cambridge, MA

Find out more online:

Website: http://sts.hks.harvard.edu

Twitter :https://twitter.com/HarvardSTS

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/HarvardSTS

S E Q U O I A C L U B

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ANNE WOJCICKIApril 17, 2012

Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder of 23andMe, a personal genomics and biotechnology company, offered an engaging and provocative glimpse into the future of genet ic research , per sona l ized medic ine , and genet ic testing in her Spring 2012 Science and Democracy Lecture, “Deleterious Me: W h o l e G e n o m e Sequencing, 23andMe, and the Crowd-Sourced Health Care Revolution.” 23&Me offers genetic screening for variants linked to a wide

variety of diseases, conditions and traits, as well as raw exome sequencing. The company now holds one of the largest databases of individual genetic information that, according to Wojcicki, can be used to conduct large, efficient, crowd-sourced association studies for disease. A panel comprising Professors Jonathan Zittrain (HLS), Archon Fung (HKS), Sanford Kwinter (GSD), and Jeremy Greene, (FAS/HMS) raised important concerns regarding the use of genetic information, including privacy issues and the ownership and commercialization of large data sets.

ARCHITECTURES for LIFE

CEO and Co-Founder, 23andMe

ANNE WOJCICKI

TUESDAY April 17, 20125:00-7:00pm, Emerson Hall, Room 105

FOLLOWED BY A WORKSHOP

Deleterious MeWhole Genome Sequencing, 23andMe, and

the Crowd-Sourced Health Care Revolution

WEDNESDAY April 18, 20129:00am-4:30pm, Maxwell Dworkin, Room 119

WITH COMMENTARY FROMArchon FungHarvard Kennedy School

Jeremy GreeneHarvard Medical School and History of Science

Sanford KwinterHarvard Graduate School of Design

Jonathan ZittrainHarvard Law School

Sheila Jasanoff MODERATOR

Harvard Kennedy School

The New Infrastructures of Knowledge

Moderator: Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School� ��George Church, Harvard and Wyss Institute � ��Stephen Friend, Sage Bionetworks� ��Ben Heywood, CEO of Patientslikeme � ��Craig Lipset, ,IEH�SJ�'PMRMGEP�-RRSZEXMSR��4½�^IV� ��Tania Simoncelli, Food and Drug Administration

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Implications for Society

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Summary and Outlook

� ��Jonathan Beckwith, Harvard Medical School, Microbiology � ��Raju Kucherlapati, Harvard Medical School, Genetics

SCIENCE & DEMOCRACYLECTURE SERIES 2012

http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

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HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL

Science, Technology & Society

CO-SPONSORED BY

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Science, Technology & SocietyHarvard University Center for the Environment

Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

ERROL MORRISNovember 29, 2011

Errol Morr is , Academy award-winning filmmaker and essayist, shared his e x p e r i e n c e s a s a n investigative journalist in his Fal l 2011 Science and D e m o c r a c y L e c t u r e , “ I n ve s t i g a t i n g w i t h a Camera.” Morris discussed t h e r e s e a r c h a n d production behind four of his most celebrated films - The Thin Blue Line, on a Texas murder case; Mr. D e a t h , o n c a p i t a l punishment and Holocaust denial; The Fog of War, on Robert McNamara and the

Vietnam War; and Standard Operating Procedure, on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. As moderator, Sheila Jasanoff, Director of the STS Program, situated Morris’ groundbreaking work in relation to questions of truth, objectivity, and the role of expert knowledge that are central to STS. Elaine Scarry, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value in the Department of English, addressed Morris’ innovative use of interviews and archival material. Morris’ new book, A Wilderness of Error : The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, was released by Penguin Press in September.

The Thin Blue Line Mr. Death The Fog of War Standard Operating Procedure

Investigating with a Camera

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COMMENTATOR

Elaine ScarryWalter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value, Department of English, Harvard University

MODERATED BY

Sheila JasanoffHarvard Kennedy School

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ARCHITECTURES FOR LIFE

A one-day workshop explored questions arising from Anne Wojcicki’s lecture with leaders from the biomedical sciences and engineering, social sciences, humanities, and industry. Recent developments in genomic and communication technologies are changing the social, institutional and ethical architectures of biomedicine. Examples include direct-to-consumer genetic testing and crowd-sourced, “citizen-science” epidemiology using smartphones and the web. These new architectures promise a gold rush of information and biospecimens that will provide the foundation for a more precise, personalized, and targeted medicine. They are also attracting new actors and new modes of participation that have the potential to enhance but also to destabilize established patterns of ethical, legal, and social responsibilities in biomedicine. Further details about the workshop, with references to relevant work (including work by former STS Fellows Ben Hurlbut and Kris Saha) can be found at http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/events/workshops/architectures-for-life.html.

SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY LECTURES

WORKSHOPS AND EVENTS

[CONTINUED]

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HUMAN NATURE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE This workshop, held in collaboration with the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, featured speakers John Carson (Michigan) and Baruch Fischhoff (Carnegie Mellon), and commentary from Andrew Jewett (Harvard), Elizabeth Lunbeck (Vanderbilt), Jennifer Lerner (HKS), and Nastasha Schüll (MIT).   Convenors Jamie Cohen-Cole and Sheila Jasanoff invited participants to think about public policy as a human science, through which policymakers enact tacit assumptions about what humans are like and how people reason. Carson presented a paper on “The Sciences of Human Nature and Their Histories,” using three historical case-studies to show how visions of human nature shape political cultures. Fischhoff ’s paper, titled “Decision-Making Competence,” described the intellectual roots of decision science and its normative, descriptive, and prescriptive dimensions. In the following conversation, participants discussed the relationship between competent and “knowledge-able” subjects, the implications of grounding theories of human nature in a science (e.g., genetics or neuroscience), and the relationship between the human subject in the law and the subject encountered in the neuroeconomics literature. Workshop participants also discussed themes for further collaboration and research.

SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY NETWORK

The Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Science and Democracy Network (SDN) was held at the Institut Francilien Recherche Innovation Société (IFRIS) in Paris on June 25-27, 2012. Presentations covered a broad range of topics, from Turkish IVF and Israeli responses to brain death to European Integration, technoscientific pathways in the UK, the Chilean politics of expertise, and Japan’s responses to risk and radioactivity after Fukushima. A special public session on June 25 on “Science, Law and Democracy” featured an exchange between Marie-Angèle Hermitte, research director at CNRS and l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and Sheila Jasanoff, with Rafael Munagorri, Shobita Parthasarathy, David Winickoff offering comments.

RESEARCH NEWS

The STS Program received a research grant, Biology and the Law, from the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at the University of Cambridge, through its program on Uses and Abuses of Biology. Combining expertise in biology, law, and political theory, the project will clarify how biology and the law conceptualize and reinforce each other in regulating new biological entities that disrupt the boundaries between life and non-life, human and non-human, and persons and property. The research team, led by Sheila Jasanoff, Ben Hurlbut and

Kris Saha, with Ingrid Metzler as postdoctoral fellow, will study the evolution of explicit and tacit norms via formal legal decisions, informal lab practices, and public discourses. By tracing these pathways in the scientific, legal and political cultures of the US, UK, and Germany, the study will refine our understanding of the ways in which biology and the law condition and constrain each other’s forms of creativity. 

[CONTINUED]

S E Q U O I A C L U B

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Ben Hurlbut and Kris Saha published an opinion piece in The Scientist entitled “Occupy Science?” This grew out of their collaboration as STS fellows at Harvard. See http://www.the-scientist.com/?ar ticles.view/ar ticleNo/31624/title/Opinion--Occupy-Science-/ Sebastian Pfotenhauer, with Chris Jones, Kris Saha, and Sheila Jasanoff, co-authored “Learning from Fukushima,” Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 2012, pp. 79-84. 

Will Rafey, ’13, Harvard College Junior concentrating in Socia l Studies , received the 2nd Annual STS Undergraduate Prize for his essay, “Discount rates, economists and climate change policy.” Melissa Oppenheim, ’12, and Adrianna Stanley, ’13, both History of Science concentrators, received honorable mentions. Science and Public Reason, a collection of essays by Sheila Jasanoff, was published by Routledge’s Earthscan series in the summer of 2012.

TRAINING AND CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

SECONDARY FIELD

This September, the Secondary Field in Science, Technology and Society welcomed a new Executive Committee member, David Jones, A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and History of Science. Over the past academic year, the field has continued to attract students from widely diverse backgrounds in law, public policy, design, chemistry, engineering and applied sciences, biomedical engineering, and anthropology. In addition to their coursework, STS Secondary Field candidates present their research in the STS Circle or in a capstone seminar. For more information on the Secondary Field, visit: http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/field/.

STS CIRCLE

The seventh year of the STS Circle at Harvard showcased a wide range of research engaging with Science and Technology Studies in the Cambridge community and beyond. Presenters included Steven Epstein (Northwestern), Paul Forman (Smithsonian Institution), and Shi-Lin Loh, doctoral candidate in East Asian Literatures and Cultures and member of the STS Secondary Field.

STS NEXT 20 PORTAL

Following last year's highly successful conference looking back and ahead at 20 years of STS, Program affiliates led by Sam Evans, Tolu Odumosu, and Alex Wellerstein created a por tal,  http://stsnext20.org/, to serve the STS community in a number of ways. The site contains archived material from the April 2011 conference. It presents in map form a list of current STS training centers around the wor ld . I t a l so o f fer s two in ter act i ve d i scuss ion formats: Vignettes  (edited by Margo Liptsin) invites and showcases short, STS-informed analyses of current events; Perspectives (edited by Tolu) addresses longer-term and structural issues affecting STS as a field. This site is an experiment and a work in progress. Its ultimate value will be defined by the use the STS community makes of it. 

New Fellows

Erik AardenMarie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, European Union Seventh Framework Program

Tom Bauler (Spring 2013)Assistant Professor and Chair, Environment and Economics, Free University of Brussels

Ruha BenjaminAssistant Professor, Sociology and African American Studies, Boston University

Laurence Delina (Spring 2013)Ph.D candidate in Environmental Policy and Management, University of New South Wales

Friederike GesingPh.D candidate in Social Studies, University of Bremen

Connie JohnstonPh.D candidate in Geography, Clark University

Martin Mahony (Fall 2012)Ph.D candidate, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

Helen Pallett (Fall 2012)Ph.D candidate, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

Gustavo RibeiroS.JD candidate, Harvard Law School

Mattijs van MaasakkersPh.D candidate in environmental planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technolgoy

Trina VithayathilPh.D candidate in sociology, Brown University

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FELLOW MILESTONES

Maggie Curnutte, STS Fellow 2009-2012, accepted a postdoctoral fellowship in bioethics at Baylor College of Medicine's Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.

Rachel Douglas-Jones completed her Ph.D. dissertation, Locating Ethics: capacity building, ethics review and research governance across Asia, at the University of Durham (UK) in September 2012 and will have her viva in February 2013. This fall she is working on a project at Durham on the Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia (1881-1936).

Sam Evans, STS and SEAS Fellow 2009-2011, co-authored a paper in Minerva with Walter Valdivia on academic freedom and national security. He continues to work on strengthening the intellectual life and presence of Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society. Ben Hurlbut, in collaboration with ASU Jewish Studies professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, received a grant from the  the  John Templeton Foundation/Boston University Historical Society's program in Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs  for a project entitled “The Transhumanist Imagination: Innovation, Secularization, Eschatology.” The project  examines a posture toward the future that regards technology as a site of agency, an engine of change, and an emancipatory force in society.  Christopher Jones, Ciriacy-Wantrup fellow at UC Berkeley, gave a guest lecture on energy transitions at Frédéric Vandermoere’s invitation at the University of Antwerp in October 2012. 

Maya Mitre won two distinguished awards from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, for her Ph.D. dissertation, titled Ciência e Política na era das novas biotecnologias: uma análise do marco regulatório brasileiro à luz de outras experiências (Science and Politics in the Age of Modern Biotechnology: An analysis of the Brazilian case in the light of other experiences). The awards were for best dissertation in Political Science and the University's "Grande Prêmio" award for the best dissertation in the combined fields of humanities, social sciences, and the arts.   

Cormac O'Raifeartaigh presented a seminar “Who Discovered the Expanding Universe?” at the “Origins of the Expanding Universe” conference in Flagstaff, Arizona, and at the BEYOND Centre of Arizona State University in September 2012. In August 2012, Krishanu Saha took up a position as Assistant Professor in the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Medical History & Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His lab will combine stem cel l b io logy and STS with in the new interdisciplinary Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. Malte Schophaus, STS Fellow in 2004, was appointed Professor of Psychology at the University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration and Management of North Rhine-Westphalia, Cologne, in November 2011.

Samuel Taylor-Alexander, STS Fellow in 2009-2010, completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology at Australian National University in 2012, with a dissertation entitled, Surgical Citizenship and Ethical Subjects: Reconstructing the Body Politic in Mexico. He was appointed a teaching fellow and asked to design a syllabus in the anthropology of science at the University of Auckland. Frédéric Vandermoere, 2009-2010 STS Fellow, was appointed assistant professor in Sociology at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in January 2012. Frédéric is leading numerous initiatives to develop STS at the University of Antwerp, including a new program on sustainability transitions. Look out for Frédéric's upcoming article in Minerva, titled “Disciplinary networks and bounding: Scientific communication between science and technology studies and the history of science” (co-authored with Raf Vanderstraeten). Lee Vinsel, STS and SEAS Fellow in 2011-2012, accepted a position as assistant professor of Science and Technology Studies at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Former Fellows David Winickoff and Samuel Evans won a grant from the UC Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation to host a series of workshops and working groups at UC Berkeley on transnational issues related to upstream governance of synthetic biology and geoengineering.

CURRENT FELLOWS NEWS Ruha Benjamin's new book, People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, will be published in 2013 by Stanford University Press (http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=20585). Trina Vithayathil was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and Junior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies to complete her dissertation research on a contemporary caste census in India.